Happens all the time, actually, they usually just don't offer a way to unlock it. They make a run of all the chips of a given architecture, then put them through tests. The ones that pass clean are set to highest offered speed or full cache, while the not quite so good ones are brought down a notch. Also happens for GPUs, hard drive platters, and even resistor tolerances.

Sometimes people figure out tricks to unlock everything (with the caveat that the company sold it to you that way for a reason), but who knew Intel would sell their own tool hacker tool?

This isn't the same thing, though - these are perfectly good chips that are crippled so that Intel doesn't have to manufacture chips at multiple price points. Maybe their reject rate has dropped enough that it's not a viable way to get lower-performance chips.

It seems to me to be a means to unlock potential that was previously locked because of marketing demands. Chips aren't made for specific speeds, they make a batch and "bin" them based on testing.

Before, when you bought a 2.2 GHz chip, it was in a batch of chips that also happens to include chips that made the 3GHz bin, but they clock locked them to multipliers specific to 2.2 GHz. Sometimes those 2.2 chips were marked such because really weren't reliable at 3 GHz, but sometimes people found they ran perfe

The only reason I can imagine is that they're sitting on some technology that will greatly reduce fabrication flaws, which means that far more chips will be coming out of their factories that are capable of running at full specification than the market wants.

That, or they're already outputting a high percentage of chips that are capable of running at higher rates, and disabling them - a much higher percentage than they used to be able to manage, if it makes sense to actually market these chips as upgradeable.

This isn't the same thing, though - these are perfectly good chips that are crippled so that Intel doesn't have to manufacture chips at multiple price points.

Excuse me, but I fail to see the loser here.

Intel wins: it can focus resources on manufacturing a single processor for multiple price-pointsCustomer wins: for a fee, they can upgrade their processor without having to touch a single piece of hardware

Why the outrage? If you assume Intel doesn't have enough defects to bin into lower priced models, compare this to their alternative. They manufacture and sell additional processor lines in order to cover all their price segments. Consequently, fewer engineering resources per line, less optimization and likelihood of "free" clock-speed bumps, and higher manufacturing costs per processor (and therefore less downward pricing flexibility).

"But Intel isn't giving me all I bought!"Bullshit. You *bought* the cheaper model. If you wanted the more expensive one, then you pay for it. If you don't like Intel's pricing, then you buy AMD.

True enough, but I think it's going to backfire on them -- by driving down the price of those chips by the $50 everyone knows they'll have to spend to get what they figure they really paid for.

I think they'd do their market a lot better by releasing a free tool that would helpfully upclock CPUs by as much as the chip can handle (at your own risk, of course). Then people would feel like they got more than they paid for (instead of feeling ripped off), and that always results in good word-of-mouth.

This isn't the same thing, though - these are perfectly good chips that are crippled so that Intel doesn't have to manufacture chips at multiple price points.

Yes, like they have been doing for years. If demand for cheap chips exceeds demand for expensive chips, they cripple some expensive chips and sell them cheaply. This increases their profits and, by decreasing the complexity of the manufacturing process, also reduces the price of the expensive chips. It's a good thing.

The only new thing here is that they are now also providing a simple way for people who got one of the crippled chips to uncripple it. Which is also a good thing.

I was outraged when I saw the Slashdot headline too. Then I read TFA. Then I spent a few seconds thinking about the pros and cons of this. And suddenly I'm not outraged any more. I put it to Slashdot that this concept of "thinking" is a useful tool that ought to be applied more widely.

When you try to unlock an extra core or to overclock a processor there is no guarantee it will work. The manufacturer tells you what the specs of the unit are , which is what you paid for, and from then on you are on your own.Here we are talking about a case where the cpu has features disabled on purpose but guaranteed to work as long as you provide a ransom fee. While I can find some logic in it, they are in fact telling the consumer that they make a good profit already with the price they charge for the "crippled" unit, since they are willing to sell it at that price. Then the extra $$ is the "idiot tax" they will get from some users.I really hope AMD returns to its early Athlon days so that Intel can be in check. Judging from the previews of their netbook APU (http://www.anandtech.com/show/3933/amds-zacate-apu-performance-update) they might have something to show next year...

Pirated or jailbroken, that is one CPU I will not buy. Intentionally holding a gun to the customer's head by crippling the device until you pay a ransom is not a way to get my business.

I completely agree. This 'method' of doing business has been going on for a long time in the digital spectrometer world and mainframe world. I find it revolting and for the period when I had some decision power on what was being purchased I made it very clear to vendors that I would never consider their equipment for that very reason. Fortunately (for them), I'm back to lowly coder now.

You know... Intel being the CPU manufacturer, could make this really robust.
Each CPU already gets stamped with a unique serial number.
They could stamp each one with a unique unlock code that goes with the serial number, as well.

Then the only way to 'unlock' the function would be to go through Intel, so they would look up your specific CPU's unlock code in the database.

That's impossible to pirate, because there's no way you can share the code.
As long as they assure the unlock code is the only mechanism allowed to re-enable the capabilities, and there is no BIOS mechanism to override the lock.

How long until the serial numbers are spoofed?
This reminds me of the Pentiums with those identifiers being broadcast to the internet. It didn't take long for those to be disabled, and ultimately, Intel decided it was the wrong thing to do.
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2000/04/35950 [wired.com]

Yes, but AMD aren't trying to sell you an upgrade...You may have a 3rd core which is defective, or you may get lucky and its just disabled and you can re-enable it with software for free. Either way you bought a cheaper chip.Intel on the other hand are selling a chip which is definitely fully working, and then trying to charge you extra to make use of the hardware you've already bought. AMD aren't trying to screw money out of you, you *may* end up getting a bargain out of them.

I don't have access to Intel's market research data, so I can't meaningfully predict if they would make more or less money with that approach. It's worth noting, however, that Intel's entire business model revolves around largely artificial market segmentation. The difference in production cost between their high end and low end chips is significantly smaller than the difference in sale price. They used to have much higher yields of the cheaper chips (which were just the good chips where not everything passed the tests, e.g. the FPU on the 486sx), but they quite often the yields don't fit with where their sales team wants to put the market segments and so they just cripple some chips before selling them. AMD does the same thing.

This is just a way of more dynamically adjusting the segments, as well as making upgrades cheaper. Now, rather than buying a crippled chip and replacing it with a non-crippled chip later, you buy a crippled chip and undo the crippling in software. This, effectively, lets Intel sell you the same CPU twice.

This could really muck up the depreciation cost of IT data centers.Intel has to have run some financial models on this to go this direction.

Is the $50 unlock going to depreciated or be full cost 3 years after the initial sale?

If I got a racks that we don't have to have a pull and replace with current CPUs but could get another 1 -2 years by unlocking them I'm going to get a note from the comptroller for not choosing to spend the really low unlock cost but instead going with upgrades which will be higher.

You're not thinking about the marketing opportunity Apple has with this. This isn't like Apple charging customers extra for 802.11n. Apple had an acceptable reason. You sell me a chip that is intentionally handicapped, and then tell me that for $50 more, you will unlock it; as a consumer, it's fully reasonable for me to think you're taking advantage of me. It doesn't cost you anything to sell me that same product not handicapped, so why do this if it's not just to make more money? This is about perception, not logic and not facts. Why not just sell me a fully working product the first time? I can understand having to pay extra for MPEG-2 support in a piece of software or hardware, as there are licensing issues with a third party, but you're Intel. This is your chip.

Apple could bank on this by not using these chips and then running a new Mac vs PC ad wherein PC talks about all the great things you can do while going over a list of upgrades you have to unlock along the way: first to Windows so you can have all the features, then the CPU, and then toss in a joke maybe about GPU and RAM upgrades. Again, it's perception.

You know that you probably bought a handicapped chip already, right? Chances are a good portion of the economy cpus out there had a core or two disabled just to meet a shipping quota and price point, not because the core failed an integrity check. So, Intel spends some money making the Q/A test disable cores when it needs more chips in the economy bin and less in the high-end one. This just shifts the market a little. Now, instead of disabling a core by frying it completely, they just lock it in firmware. You, the end user, still get your economy priced chip. If you decide to upgrade you just buy the software to unlock it.

This is not some software that works the other way around, you know. The chip you buy isn't going to say "4 Cores and 32Mb cache" and then show up as 2 and 1 meg. The box might tell you, instead "2 core (upgradeable to 4)". The computer upgrade goes from being something geeks know how to do, to something any mom and pop and uncle bob can do. If they can get past the perception of it, no big deal. However, most of those people have no idea what a computer upgrade requires, and telling them that you can do it with software is something they have suspected anyways.

Of course, but that's not the point. As the OP said, it's about PERCEPTION. Most people don't really think about (or even know about for many consumers) the fact that their CPU may be a downscaled version of another one. If you offer to "unlock" those disabled features for a price though, then it's a firm slap in the face reminding you that this chip most assuredly is just arbitrarily limited.

Consider it like a John visiting a prostitute. Most of them know that the prostitute is only sleeping with him f

Try reading the comment you are replying to: "Chances are a good portion of the economy cpus out there had a core or two disabled just to meet a shipping quota and price point, not because the core failed an integrity check."

Just because you believe that to be the case doesn't mean the current reality will reflect that. You can't just choose *not* not pay the licensing fee for a mpeg2 decoder from Apple (either rolled into the cost of the OS or in the Quicktime Pro fee) because they *do* respect it.

You can, of course, get the mpeg2 encoder from other sources but we're not talking about that in this instance.

> I can understand having to pay extra for MPEG-2 support in a piece of software or hardware

I was wondering when this would come up and when some fanboy would try to make excuses for this absurdity.

It's just bogus. MacOS can play a DVD. So obviously it has all necessary rights sorted out to deal withMPEG2 and AC3 and ANYTHING else related to the fact that it is able to play a DVD for you "out of the box".

The idea that you have to pay extra to add any of these capabilities to Quicktime is pure nonsense.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but I've been in the semiconductor business for over 30 years and we've always been doing this. Manufacture one device with certain performance or features that can be disabled and sell 2 or more different versions. It happens with other kinds of technologies, as well.

You're confused about the cost part of the equation, though. Usually what happens is that the marketing gurus figure out how much market share you're going to get with each flavor and set the price accordingly. Often, if you only sold the low-end version you would not make enough profit. You count on some sales of the high-end version to offset the actual cost. It's a gamble and if your marketing team guesses wrong, and no one wants the high-end flavor, you lose money. If they guess wrong and everyone only wants the high-end flavor, then everyone gets a nice bonus...

I've seen it go both ways.

If the upgrade capability was zero cost, Intel would do exactly what you say. Just make that the standard; it's free marketshare. The fact that they had to get creative is a sure sign that it's not zero cost.

If they're already doing the serial number, then a unique random code wouldn't be much of a bother.

There'd have to be more to it than just that though. Usually in those cases (such as with the sat receivers) they have to put in special circuitry in the chip.

lets say they didn't do that and just put another random number in there, lets not even say they hash the sn, we'll give them benefit of the doubt that they use a real random number and just keep a table at the plant for sn and random unlock code.

but if it does, it's a big opportunity for AMD. Of course, odds are it'll get cracked at some point and we'll be able to grab an "Intel Upgrade Service Crack" torrent.

Presumably Intel will be using the CPU serial number to keep track of legitimate users and so forth. But here it comes: have we bought a central processing unit which has now become our property because we paid for it, or are we simply buying a "license" to use Intel's "intellectual property"? If I go out and buy a penknife, I don't expect to have to pay more money if I want to be able to use the built-in compass. Will the BSA (or some similar organization) come down on companies that unlock their processors without paying Intel's upgrade fee? This has the potential to get ugly.

IBM's been doing that sort of thing for years. They ship you a mainframe with more processors than you ordered or a disk array with more disk than you ordered, and you can pay them to turn it on. Some companies only turn on their extra processors for a short time each year (Like end-of-year transaction processing) and if you decide you need some more space in your disk array, it's much more convenient than having to have more disks installed or buy a new disk array.

IBM's been doing that sort of thing for years. They ship you a mainframe with more processors than you ordered or a disk array with more disk than you ordered, and you can pay them to turn it on. Some companies only turn on their extra processors for a short time each year (Like end-of-year transaction processing) and if you decide you need some more space in your disk array, it's much more convenient than having to have more disks installed or buy a new disk array.

True. My father used to work on a Hewlett-Packard mainframe back in the seventies, and he ordered some extra hard disk space. The HP tech came out, opened the casing of each drive (big freestanding units), reached in the back and flipped a DIP switch. Voila!, extra space. He even showed Dad how to turn on the entire drive if he wanted... apparently HP didn't care (it wasn't a contract violation or anything) but wouldn't provide any support if you did.

Since its a software unlock, it can come down to a DMCA violation, or it's a possible software style "codec" to designed to "optimize" your processor (which would make it software piracy to do it without paying for the unlocked). As a hardware only concept it might be a harder issue (but could work along the lines of modchipping laws possibly), but since it's software then the BSA could decide to have a go at you.

Yep sounds like they'd need DMCA, and if I was the CEO of AMD I'd be fricking dancing in the streets at this news. hell the commercial writes itself/shows sleazy used car salesman type selling PCs/ "Intel sells you hardware you can't use until you pay ANOTHER fee on TOP of what you paid for your computer. We here at AMD think you should get what you paid for, so we don't deal with such shady tactics"/sleazy salesman points at Intel box that side falls off and tries to cover it up/

I would imagine that it would be similar legally to applying mods or cracks to game consoles or iPhones. Breaking a digital lock is, in itself, illegal in some countries and that would certainly qualify. Beyond that, I've never really understood the argument that you can't do what you want with your phone/console/chip.

My question is how is the patch applied? Is it a firmware update on the processor itself? (Do processors have firmware to update?) Bios update? If it's in the operating system, what does the p

If I go out and buy a penknife, I don't expect to have to pay more money if I want to be able to use the built-in compass.

Not a great analogy. Can you try again only with more cars?

This isn't a case of you buying a Core i7 and Intel saying "by the way, we only gave you a Core i5, but you can have the full i7 you paid for if you give us another $50".

This is a case of you buying a Core i5 and Intel saying "here is exactly what you paid for, and by the way, if you ever decide you should have bought a Core i7 instead, we can magically teleport one into your computer for just $50".

If you want the pocket knife with a built-in compass, pay for the one that has a compass in it. If you deliberately buy a knife that says "KNIFE WITHOUT COMPASS (compass is available at extra cost)", you have no reason to complain when it turns out you have to pay extra to get a compass!

There's no bait-and-switch here. People are getting exactly what is advertised. Where's the problem?

...except that you did buy an i7, it's just that they didn't tell you about it. Just because a feature wasn't advertised doesn't mean I didn't pay for it when I bought the hardware, or that the price I paid didn't include the cost of manufacturing that extra feature. You shouldn't be going around critiquing other peoples' analogies if you're going to liken activating hardware that you've already paid for to magically teleporting new hardware into your computer...

It sounds like you are a bit unclear on the concept of pricing. Here's a clue:The price of something has nothing at all to do with what it costs to produce or deliver--it depends only upon what it is worth to the customer.

So no, it doesn't matter whether the hardware you bought is capable of functioning as an i7, because you didn't pay for an i7, and therefore you didn't buy it.

When you have informed consumers and zero barriers, then you have a free market. When that happens, you can't charge monopoly pricing (what the market will bear) because someone else will enter at a lower price. And no, the markup will not approach zero. If you think that, then you have no clue about finance (or are a liar trying to make others look bad by lying). Either way, that makes your opinion not worth listening to. And the fact you are an AC only supports the theory that you are a lying idiot.

...except that you did buy an i7, it's just that they didn't tell you about it. Just because a feature wasn't advertised doesn't mean I didn't pay for it when I bought the hardware, or that the price I paid didn't include the cost of manufacturing that extra feature. You shouldn't be going around critiquing other peoples' analogies if you're going to liken activating hardware that you've already paid for to magically teleporting new hardware into your computer...

So here are three scenarios:

1. You have a choice of buying an i5 for $200, or an i7 for $300.
2. You have a choice of buying an i7 that pretends to be an i5 for $200, or an i7 for $300.
3. You have a choice of buying an i7 that pretends to be an i5 for $200, or an i7 for $300. If you pay $200, you can later for a payment of $100 turn it into an i7.

For me, choices (1) and (2) are identical, but choice (3) is without any doubt better. There is no situation where I am worse off than with choice 1 or 2, and in some situations I'm better off.

There's no bait-and-switch here. People are getting exactly what is advertised. Where's the problem?

The problem is that if these extras are so cheap that Intel figures they can afford to put them in every CPU even if only a few people buy them, then there's clearly a large disparity between the cost to produce the feature and the current market price for it. Long-term, this typically happens when there's a distinct lack of competition and a natural monopoly is arising. Normally, competition will drive the market price for features down to a small percentage above their cost to produce.

I'm pretty pro-free market and have eaten my share of down-ratings here for it. But that Intel is considering something like this is a pretty big warning sign that the free market isn't working as it should in this market.

There's no bait and switch, but people instinctively understand that the sale price is supposed to closely track the marginal cost of production. Speculatively including extras but leaving them disabled reveals in bold print that the market isn't sufficiently healthy to drive the price down to it's natural free market level. When it's physically separable extra hardware you can at least argue that it's just distributed warehousing.

People won't really be able to help thinking that Intel could afford to give them a better deal since flipping the switch costs nothing.

The problem is that it doesn't make sense from the common sense point of view.

This may come down to economies of scale. If you only have to manufacture one processor, and simply deactivate parts of it, rather than tooling up for multiple chips, there might be a significant savings there. In fact, I'm rather inclined to think that that's all there is to it.

Except, I'm not sure how that really applies to hardware. Can you license hardware? Remember, modding consoles is illegal because you start fiddling with licensed software as well, not just the hardware you own.

No, you can't license hardware unless there is an agreement prior to purchase that you are doing so. U.S. courts have consistently ruled that a tangible product you buy retail is bought outright, not licensed, with complete disregard to any "licensing" language there may be on the package or elsewhere.

The only exception so far is software, and that's only because almost unbelievably, to date there has been no major court ruling on the matter. To be honest, I do not know why software should be any excepti

A) When has bluray been cracked? I know that the HDCP master key is no longer a secret and I know that a few people have then said "bluray hsa been cracked", but those people are morons. HDCP is the encryption of the digital signal sent between a video generation circuit and a monitor/television/display. In theory you could build a small device that you hook to your bluray player and then capture a digital signal and reencode the uncompressed signal, but that's hardly a crack. It's just a reinvention of the

Sometimes it is harder to get an OEM computer to use AMD (like apple) but according to AMD's website: Powering ultrathin notebooks to blade servers, all AMD processors shipped are designed to use AMD-V features. [amd.com] Where as Intel has been a little less free and more cumbersome. For instance most Atom processors by Intel do not support virtualization but all shipping AMD (and it has been a while) do. Also computer models such as the sony viao (undercapitalized for a reason) use the "feature" provided by Intel to disallow virtualization through the BIOS, meaning that you have to turn in on before booting. Along with other technology that AMD has developed makes you wonder why Intel is so dominant in the space. So for an informed geek, switching to AMD was already a good move, if only the manufacturers would follow.

Just like all those informed geeks switched to Intel when it was revealed that AMDs could be unlocked with a pencil, and all that separated one processor to the other was a little trace printed on the outside of the chip? The companies have been doing this stuff for years, releasing chips that don't quite meet quality control as a slower chip, and when the distribution channels crash due to unforeseen circumstances, ship identical higher speed chips with the clock turned down even though there's nothing wro

I believe that HP/Agilent was the first company to do this. They would manufacture something with gobs of RAM and then charge you extra money to enable the 'option' that was already present. It costs less for a manufacturer to produce a single version of their product than for multiple versions with different capabilities. Intel realizes this but their marketing people are full of shit (just like HP's were). They didn't lose any money when they sold you the processor. The software unlock is 100% pure profit. It's really annoying to know that you have paid for and posses capability that you cannot use.

That's a bit different. They disabled a chip, and sold you the board. You could turn it on if you wanted - with no guarantee that it'd actually work. They do the same with multi-core CPUs. They build em all with X cores, during QA, if one of the cores fails a test, they'll just disable the core, and sell it as X-1.You're perfectly free to try and re-enable your disabled core - but there's a chance it won't work. They can't sell them as X-core processors, because they can't guarantee all cores will work.

It would be relatively simple for the BIOS to turn off CPU features in such a way that they can't be turned back on without a reset. So the easy way to implement this would be for Intel to partner with a PC vendor and charge for the BIOS upgrade that doesn't disable the CPU features in question. With such a system, it would mean that you could pull the CPU and put it in a different motherboard, and get all the features, but that's not going to be a concern for the business model until they're talking about hundreds of dollars for the added features.

Putting this into the CPU would require that the CPUs be designed specifically to support this, which is not as likely to be the case, but would be much more difficult to defeat.

So I went to buy a laptop from bestbuy and this dude from the geeksquad told me they could make my cpu go 18% faster. I was baffled, I asked him, "so you're saying i'm buying a cpu that's 18% slower than what it says on the specs?". After giving him sarcastic replies for like 3mins, he finally told me they didn't have that system in stock, lol. The asshole probably wanted to sell that shit to some unsuspecting mom. Fuck the geeksquad.

"Currently, CPU upgrades are available on selected Windows 7 systems."

It installs the application. Does it run every time your computer boots? Does that mean the unlock isn't permanent? If I pay to unlock the chip, and then reboot into Linux, is the CPU still unlocked? If I have to reinstall Windows, do I have to reinstall (or re-purchase) the upgrade?

This reminds me of an old 486 upgrade chip for the 386DX that was pin compatible. It would run the same speed as a 386DX, but one had to install a.SYS driver in MS-DOS to turn on the internal clock-doubling and such. No driver, no performance gain.

I wonder if it is the same stuff, where the CPU is fed some sequence to have it allow access to the full cache and such. Of course, I will be almost 100% sure that this driver will be not something open-sourced, so expect the performance boost by "unlocking" t

Yes. Modern CPUs can be given what's called a 'microcode update' during system boot by driver. Microcode updates are volatile, so they need to be reapplied on each boot. Generally this is done to fix minor bugs that slipped through testing. In this case, Intel is allowing the microcode to unlock additional capabilities.

Only available for Windows 7 right now, but generally microcode update drivers are available for all common platforms (e.g., Linux). If Intel is serious about this business model, it's likely that they'll roll out updated microcode drivers for other supported platforms soon.

The take-away here is that when I buy an Intel processor, I'm not getting the best performance, I'm not getting the best price, and I'm not getting the the best value. At best, I'll get crippleware. Crippleware sucked and I'm glad it died out of the marketplace back in the late 90s.

Some Intel products open security holes on your system with their defective DRM: http://extendedsubset.com/?p=30 [extendedsubset.com] . I just figured they couldn't get competent C programmers after what they did to Randal Schwartz http://www.lightlink.com/spacenka/fors/ [lightlink.com] . The HDCP leak was yet another example of fail. But now they want to bring this level of quality engineering directly into the CPU? Haha, no thanks guys.

Imagine the APT malware that would be possible if the CPU microcode update protections get busted wide-open like HDCP just did.

Now was it really such a good idea to hand the Elbonian Business Network a way to sell cracks for who-knows-how-many millions of CPUs for $50 each? Congratulations Intel, the black market value of a crack on your microcode just went from $100k to $M++. Did you stop to consider the fact that some of the top supercomputers on the planet are botnets? That's right: the adversary has the computational resources of a state actor and he doesn't even pay his own power bill.

I'm sitting right now within arm's reach of 14 Intel cores I've bought within the last year or two (from Atoms to i7's), never mind the stuff I have a voice in professionally. My next general purpose CPU is coming from AMD.

This is not as bad as it looks. In fact, this could be real good for the Customers. This model will allow me to pay less for a machine when I don't need that much performance. If the performace is not meeting my needs, then I may use the upgrade card and increase the life of my machine. I don't see why folks here are making big deal out of it. How is software upgrade different from hardware upgrade? Even Microsoft and Apple do the same where they charge different price for different features and technically charge less for features by disabling some. So I think software and hardware upgrades are analgous. I actually like that Intel is thinking out of the box and trying to do something different. This only means better and more options for the Customer.

The physical difference between your uber cpu and a z80 is half a teaspoon of sand and some subtlety in the arrangement. You don't think you actually paying that much for the physical material in your processor are you? If a cpu manufacturer just sold their top cpu design at it's best configuration with the development costs spread evenly then they would find themselves priced out of the entry level market (sell far less chips and the top ones would end up being far more expensive). All the variations in cpu's are a way to spread those design costs around while not forcing people to pay for what they don't need. What's being proposed here is brilliant in principle, put the extra stuff on the chip (Which doesn't cost them much) and give people the upgrade opportunity, which should be far cheaper for all concerned than stamping out another piece of nearly identical silicon when the customer discovers the new generation of games aren't quite fast enough. My primary concern is that if this is a boot time driver update then Intel's "upgrade" only applies to whatever operating systems they deem fit to support.

It's an interesting argument. Exactly the same argument could be made on both sides for commercial server software that is locked to given number of users. The comparison is very similar and I'm sure there are many people who would make the same counter argument in that case.

An early poster pointed out that it's common for cpu manufactures to hard lock features out (either because of defect or purely to create bigger range of product), do you object to this as well?

Look at it this way: you buy a CPU at $200 with one core. A year later, you need more performance. Instead of trashing the entire computer (ram, cpu, and motherboard at least), you simply pay a mere $50, unlock 3 more cores, booth the clock by 100% and throw-in hyperthreading. You'll extend the life of the unit for at least another year saving a few hundred dollars. Make it 6 months and another 6 months but the idea is the same.

They wouldn't have sold the crippled CPU to you if $200 wasn't a fair price for at least the full quad-core CPU, since that's what they had to manufacture. Whether you keep it as single-core, or pay extra for the upgrade, you are with absolute certainty being ripped off.

Nah. This is really no different than Microsoft's six editions of Windows - Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate. It doesn't cost MS any more to stamp out an Ultimate disc than a Starter one, so why not just have the Ultimate edition only?

The reasons are economic. If you only had one version of Windows, what do you charge for it?

I'm not going to bother to look up the actual prices for the editions, so let's make 'em up. Let's say that Home Premium is $50 and Ultimate is

Except that I've already paid for that hardware with the original $200, and Intel made a profit on it unless they were daft enough to sell it to me at a loss. It cost a fixed amount to build that chip, based on wafer cost, die size, test time and yield. It'd be one thing if they took a bunch of chips in which some of the nonessential features failed final test and then sold them at a lower cost instead of throwing them away, but these proposed feature-locked chips are necessarily fully-functional chips in w

The higher end CPU actually costs fractionally less to manufacture; they are all created unlocked (because they have to be fully tested unlocked), but then the lower-end CPUs have an extra assembly step of getting locked down. And the company has to spend the money on the whole unlock sales-force.

You already are... by buying the Pentium instead of the more expensive i3 that already has the extra MB of L3 and HT enabled.

_____

Intel and AMD have both been shipping chips with certain features disabled to meet market demands for years. Nvidia and ATI do the same with GPUs. Sometimes the disabled parts are actually defective, but sometimes not. Then you have two chips that cost the exact same to manufacture sell at two different price points, with the manufacturer intentionally choosing to sell some at a lower price (with the plan of making up the difference through higher sales).

Owners of certain AMD processors have been able to unlock entire cores along with extra cache for some time now. Intel is just trying to profit from it. I just don't know how well that idea will go over with the uninformed masses. I think many will be just a bit pissed-off that they were sold an intentionally-crippled computer. Unfortunately, any backlash will be aimed at the company who's logo is on the box, not Intel.

But this is backwards. In the sane world, the reason why paying less gets you less is because the cheaper product was cheaper to make. Not only is their locked down product not cheaper to make, but it's actually making the whole line more expensive. Some of our dollars are actually going towards the developers for the purpose of making the product worse, by locking it down.

No, price discrimination is when identical goods are offered at different prices to different markets. But the chip with the extra two processors enabled is not identical to the chip without those processors enabled, as you can easily prove by doing a benchmark. And a 16 GB iPad is not identical to a 32 GB iPad, because the latter has more memory. Having different profit margins on different products does not constitute price discrimination.

EXACTLY! I'm new at this stuff too, and I think you are on to something. You just have to boolean the bit that controls the memory hash function pointer. Then you can probably just decrypt the parity bit endian stack!

I had a SAAB back in the day with a computer-controlled turbocharger. I don't remember the specifics, but it was a 900 model. I had a black turbo controller. If you had the red box, you got a few extra pounds of boost. That was the only difference between two trim levels as far as the engine was concerned, same internals.

Look at the photos of the actual card. There's a barcode with a bunch of numbers. There are some digits on the left, a bunch of zeroes, and then a number that's just a bit over 2^31.Presumably, there's an unknown code under the silver. We don't yet know what data gets sent over the web during the un-downgrading process, but it's quite possible that upgrades may be performed even while that system is offline, perhaps by reading codes over the telephone.